Föreslagna åtgärder: All students completing a university degree in sweden should learn about the latest climate science and how it relates to their lives and work in future

Direct support to educational development for a rapid change to education in all higher education institutions should be a priority of the Swedish climate policy

Sammanfattning: Make it a legal requirement that every student completing a degree in Sweden is offered a comprehensive view of current climate change science and a required task to investigate how their discipline or chosen field of work is implicated in climate change.

Prioritise in higher education legislation immediately and significantly influencing the content of higher education as a key part of climate change policy. Providing resources to educational development to allow new programs and classes to be developed around this topic, and existing programs to be redesigned and added to.

Motiv och bakgrund: The new climate policy framework Sweden has taken up http://www.government.se/articles/2017/06/the-climate-policy-framework/ lays out a challenging pathway for action on Climate Change, that itself will need to be improved upon significantly to meet the goals of the paris agreement. This challenging situation means Significant increase in the presence of climate change as an issue in higher education will be needed. This will help bring forth leadership across all sectors on this issue, with citizens educated and empowered enough to support and ask for sometimes dramatic change in their professional roles and personal lives.

Younger people undertaking higher education (and other levels of education not addressed in this motion) over the next decade and beyond will be asked to consider future policy introduced by Sweden at all levels of government, which if Paris commitments are to be met will be in many cases quite challenging and controversial. If universities fail to be spaces in which action on climate change is taken up in a far more comprehensive way than present it is hard to imagine how the Government expects the public to make informed decisions on policy that in many cases will be seen by many as limiting their own lives in terms of, for example, energy demand, travel and consumption.

Researchers and academics in higher education, who are also often teachers, spend much of their time prioritising research projects, some of which are large scale and bring to bear large resources on various topics related to climate change. However, universities have no equivalent ability to place resources and attention on urgently needed integration into education of climate science and the cross-sectoral social transformations needed to meet the Paris agreement in Sweden and globally.

Universities can play a crucial role in bringing about the unprecedented speed of social and technical change action needed to address climate change. Just as with other public institutions charged with responsibility in society, the short and long term sustainability of social-ecological systems depends on their ability to understand and respond to climate change. Universities are organisations with unique characteristics and roles in society, being charged with knowledge production, education, interfacing with policy as a trusted knowledge broker, and an increasing list of other responsibilities and pressures. While as centres of higher learning, universities hold tremendous capacity for influencing citizens? personal and professional lives. Their central mission has always been education, but at present the institutional response to the reality of climate change has been muted relative to the scale of the challenge.